The W3C Pointer Events emerging standard continues to gain traction, advancing support for interoperable mouse, touch, and pen interactions across the web. Today, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. (MS Open Tech) made the first step towards interoperable support for Pointer Events in Blink by submitting a formal Intent to Implement to enable our engineering team to actively collaborate and work toward a positive adoption of Pointer Events by the Blink developer community.

Earlier this year, MS Open Tech published a Pointer Events prototype for WebKit on HTML5 Labs and submitted the patch to the WebKit developer forum. To help even more developers adopt the Pointer Events technology, we plan to continue our collaboration with the WebKit community.

Pointer Events makes it easier to support many browsers and devices by saving Web developers from writing unique code for each input type. Today people interact with Web content on a range of devices – phones, tablets, PCs, even the living room TV. Pointer Events unifies how you code for point, click and touch across these devices. The input model is based on the APIs already available in IE10 on Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 and you can start building websites incorporating point, click, and touch today.

Pointer Events continues to receive positive feedback from the developer community — many are already embracing it as a unified model for cross-browser multi-modal input:

The jQuery team has been watching the progress of Pointer Events and participating in the W3C standardization process as it moves to Candidate Recommendation. Congratulations to the W3C working group for their hard work in getting to the CR stage. We see Pointer Events as a great way to unify the haphazard models that exist today for mouse, touch, and other pointer devices. Our team looks forward to supporting web developer use of Pointer Events as implementations begin to arrive.

Dave Methvin, President jQuery Foundation

Pointer Events is a great way to add cross-browser support for multi-modal input from mouse, pointer, and touch. With Pointer Events reaching Candidate Recommendation stage, it is time all mobile html5 application developers paid attention. The best part; you can start using it today….

Jesse MacFadyen, Adobe Developer, Cordova Committer

Pointer Events Advances to W3C Candidate Recommendation (CR)

As announced last week by the W3C and shared by our colleagues in IE, the W3C has now published the Pointer Events specification as a Candidate Recommendation, an important step toward a standard. This progression from Last Call Working Draft to Candidate Recommendation is a mark of the effective collaboration among Microsoft Corp., Google, Mozilla, Opera, Nokia, jQuery, and others to help sites take advantage of new interactive devices for the Web.

‘Candidate Recommendation’ indicates that the W3C considers the specification widely reviewed and satisfying the Working Group’s technical requirements. It signals a call for additional implementation experience to inform the group.

MS Open Tech and the Microsoft Internet Explorer teams will continue to work with our colleagues across the industry, engaging developers to test and provide feedback on the specification to W3C.

Learn more about Pointer Events on Web Platform Docs

As you start building, migrating, or testing your apps using Pointer Events on various browser platforms, you should check out the resources available on the Pointer Events Wiki at Web Platform Docs:

You can Try out the cool multi-model input capabilities with Pointer Events Demos.

You can check out code samples such as the hand.js polyfill and even validate your own code with Pointer Events Test cases.

So much progress — Pointer Events enables you to build for the future of the Web, today. So when someone invents the next big input breakthrough (such as Tom Cruise’s crime lab from Minority Report or Tony Stark’s holographic CAD console from Iron Man), you’re already on your way to supporting new input features.

Jump in, have fun with the demos, join the discussion at #PointerEvents and update your site with the cool capabilities of Pointer Events. Point. Click. Touch.